welfare

Originally written for publication in The Boar, Warwick University’s student newspaper.

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At the start of this week I was in a rel­a­tive­ly good mood. With a string of unfinished essays hanging over me, I knew that it would be one filled with the woes of ac­tu­al­ly work­ing. How­ev­er, it began with April Fool’s Day and I was look­ing forward to en­joy­ing the tra­di­tion­al hoax story put out by my favourite lefty-hip­py news­pa­per and spir­i­tu­al home, TheGuardian.

I had to run er­rands in the morn­ing and hav­ing got up late, I knew I would only have time to skim the piece. I loaded the web­site over break­fast. ‘The day Britain changes’, the head­line read. “This should be a crack­er”, I thought to my­self. Some brilliant Brook­er-es­que satire of the coali­tion gov­ern­ment, no doubt. Oh Guardian! How I adore thee.

The joke ap­peared to take the form of a list – a spoof set of ab­surd poli­cies the gov­ern­ment was sup­pos­ed­ly en­act­ing this week. It began with a ‘spare bed­room tax’. The sort of thing the Mon­ster Rav­ing Loony Party would come up with but with a twist. The Guardian had su­per­im­posed a sin­is­ter Tory edge – the ‘tax’ would take the form of cuts to hous­ing ben­e­fit, pri­mar­i­ly hit­ting the most vul­ner­a­ble. Clever. Very clever.

I glanced down the page and spot­ted a ‘plan’ to scrap the dis­abil­i­ty liv­ing al­lowance and re­place it a new means-test­ed ben­e­fit. A sub­tle nod to a clas­sic episode of The Of­fice, in which the na­tion’s favourite so­cial­ly-in­ept bigot, Gareth Keenan, pro­pos­es ‘dis­abil­i­ty tests’ to clamp down on fraud. Not as funny and I doubt that many would get the ref­er­ence.

Be­fore I left the house, I had just had time to skim the other ‘re­forms’ the paper had fab­ri­cat­ed. Tax cuts for mil­lion­aires and an ar­bi­trary cap wel­fare pay­ments also made the list. These were of course, pre­pos­ter­ous­ly back­ward pro­pos­als clev­er­ly craft­ed to act as a re­duc­tio ad ab­sur­dumat­tack on greed-is-good Con­ser­vatism. But they weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly wacky ideas, so didn’t re­al­ly raise a smile. Be­sides, in this cli­mate, min­is­ters wouldn’t be able to offer the rich any­thing like a break so the be­liev­abil­i­ty of the piece suf­fered.

The jokes – or attacks – were all too obvious and the paper was losing me. Sadly, I was forced to admit to myself that The Guardian‘s April Fools joke had been a disappointing one.

I returned from my nondescript errands and in an effort to avoid starting work, logged on to the BBC News website. To my surprise and disappointment they seemed to be running with a similar joke themselves. They’d hired an Ian Duncan Smith impersonator to come on one of their respected radio stations and make the ridiculous claim that he could live on £53 a week, without recognising any of the challenges inherent in doing so.

Satirizing wealthy ‘out of touch’ government ministers should left to The Thick Of It. It should not pervade the respected news output of a public service broadcaster. It was at that point, I knew things were spinning out of control.

In recent days, we have witnessed an even more bizarre turn of events. Presumably in a bid to lift spirits amidst a triple dip recession, several news outlets have conspired to continue running April Fools style hoax stories beyond the first of the month. TheTelegraph reported that the Queen was to receive an additional £5m of funding, a huge sum supposedly sanctioned by George Osborne as thousands face the prospect of unemployment.

Enough is enough. The first of these jokes a rather weak ‘what would happen if the Tories had their way’ piece stretched out far too long. Now, even ultra-lefties like me have to take a stand against openly mocking the coalition with these stunts. We need our media to go back to reporting on what the government is actually doing rather than presenting us with some sick parody of what we might expect from it.

It’s time for us to listen to the steps the government is going to take to better the lives of us the most vulnerable in society. I for one, can’t wait to find out.

I was lucky enough as part of an interview best-selling author of ‘Chavs’ and Independent columnist, Owen Jones, as part of a series of interviews I am conducting for Warwick-based publication, The Student Journals on ‘The Future of the Left’.

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